From "Letters to Malcolm" by C.S. Lewis

"If the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble."

Anthropology/History

Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death also makes me want to study anthropology very badly.

"We are in great haste to constuct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate."  -Henry David Thoreau 

"Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control the contingencies in thier lives.  What people knew about had an action-value.  In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost..."

We have so much information and so little action that we are cursed with elephantine impotence.

Stuff like this makes me want to be a philosophy major.

"What ideas are conveinant to express inevitably become the important content of culture."

"With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."

(from Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman)

procrastination

I can't stop thinking that willpower is the solution to stopping my procrastination habits, but I have been saying this for a long time without much progress.  But that is because I have not given it much effort I believe. I hope it is not for lack of motivation, or just plain laziness.  I suppose I should make much more effort toward ending this procrastination, and if that fails can I move on to some more desperate measures. Which I kinda hope is what happens, I think? At least that is what I have been reading on growth says: that giving up is the way to go.  But I'm not needy enough to give up, so I guess I need something to break me. (what am i asking for?)  

"We're half awake in a fake empire."

Fake Empire by The National

The needle's worn the groove to deep.

"But there is a real choice after death? My Roman Catholic friends would be surprised, for to them souls in Purgatory are already saved.  And my Protestant friends would like it no better, for they say that the tree lies as it falls."

"They're both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.  And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities.  What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that you can watch them making."

-C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.

On the Other

There is this line in Brave New World that has been going through my head whenever I begin to think about writing: "You've got to be hurt and upset; otherwise you can't think of the really good, penetrating, x-rayish phrases." 

And this has got me realizing, I am not "hurt and upset," cause when I try to think about what gets me all riled up, nothing comes to mind except for theology, which is incredibly hard to write about, cause I have too many questions.

So what can I do to cure this? I need to get my theology down to where I can write about it, which will be hard, but vital (both important and life-giving).

In the same vein, when I was thinking about writing, it seems to me that so much of writing depends upon feeling, upon unlearning numbness, upon getting "hurt and upset", as Huxley would say.

On One Hand

After floating down the caddo in a pool raft, and learning how to roll a kayak, I now want to buy a (used) kayak.  But then I realized that would cost ~$500, so I'm going to give it some time, but I'm probably going to get one sometime soon.  

I want to get one because it would be such a fantastic way to relax (and get a adrenaline rush on the rapids) and stop dwelling in "all  the whorishness of [my] delight" and all.  I could fit it in my truck so it would be relativly easy to cart around, and finally it will last me a good long time.  

Hmmm

"One thing there is which all Satan's cunning and all the snares of temptation cannot take by surprise, and that is simplicity."  -Soren Kierkegaard

(I was  reading The Celebration of Discipline and this quote was in the section on simplicity.)

"Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth."

-Archimedes

Annie Dillard quote:

"She seemed real enough to herself, willful and conscious, but she had to consider the possibility--the likelihood, even--that she was a short-lived phenomenon, a fierce, vanishing thing like a hard shower, or a transitional form like a tadpole or a winter bud--not the thing in itself but a running start on the thing--and that she was being borne helplessly and against all her wishes to suicide, to the certain loss of self and all that she held dear.  Herself and all that she held dear--this particular combination of love for Walter Milligan, hatred of sister and piano lessons, etc.--would vanish, destroyed against her wishes by her own hand."

Bother

What a terribly temporal way to start out my blog.

But I think I'll be mixing temporal matter with deeper matters throughout though, cause I'd be afraid to ever post anything if I was intending it all to be worthwhile.

Dredg Concert

Take this weight off my shoulders, and move it to my brain.

A line from the song Spitshine by Dredg which has been ingrained in my head, like a skipping record.  Also thier song Not That Simple is stuck in there.

So Dredg is awesome, and you should listen to them.

I really want to go to their concert in either Tulsa or Austin, Tulsa has Dredg, Pelican, and Tombs all in one concert which would be sick, but it is on a Tuesday night for some reason.  

The one in Austin is on the Saturday before spring break with ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of the Dead, and they're pretty good, but I think I would enjoy Pelican more, but then again I have always wanted to go to Austin. 

 

So I'll see, probably going to go to that concert in Austin, but I want to find someone to go with me.